You might be interested in checking out TouchPal if you’re running Windows 8 on an Intel based machine. TouchPal is a brand new keyboard for your touchscreen monitors that adds a little variety to your onscreen keyboard options.

Some old you old timers might remember Swype, it came with the Samsung i8000 running Windows Mobile and later jumped over to Android. TouchPal works fairly similar to Swype in that you slide and swipe your finger around the screen to spell words. You’re constantly gliding and only need to lift your finger from the screen to select a word or start a new one. TouchPal also uses its own form of contextual prediction algorithms to help get an idea of what word you’re attempting to spell when gliding around the screen. Check out the video below to get an idea of TouchPal in action.

The best part about this little keyboard? How inexpensive it is for you to play with on your Surface Pro or other Windows 8 x86 device. Free. Unfortunately for myself, I don't have a touchscreen on any Windows 8 device yet (Surface RT, but that can't run this), so feel free to tell us how you like it in the comments below.

That is a Windows Phone 7 app - not what this article is about at all. This is a supposed replacement or alternative to the soft keyboard on Windows 8 machines using a touchscreen running full Windows 8 (not RT).

True, however I should have said WP8. I tried Slydr on my L900 and it was too slow and laggy. It seemed like the phone lacked the hardware to execute the code smoothly. Maybe its been improved by now, but I was left with the impression that WP7 was not gong to handle it well. WP8 devices though, should be quite capable I would think.

I've got an idea. WPCentral guys could work together on each article: one posts the article, the other proofreads it, THEN it gets posted. I know this is a crazy radical idea but it might just improve the quality of the site and stave off these types of comments which surely must be annoying to you post authors!

Tried it - it worked the very first time the soft keyboard popped up in a text field and that was it. Every time after that it would default back to the full soft keyboard.
Very buggy & glitchy bit of software - uninstalled.

Sadly, I had the same experience as several others. Winked once, then never again. Uninstalled it.
Now the fact that it worked the first time suggests this may just be a bit of faulty code he Developer can root out quickly. I hope they do as this would be a great addition to the W8 world, and if ported to WP8 it would totally rock!